WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: An article this week rightly called on us not to say “West Bank.” Good, but that’s just one term in a loaded lexicon that has more Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives than Ben & Jerry has silly-named ice cream flavors. Become a Word Warrior and stop using all of them.
“West Bank” – Just One of the Loaded Lexicon’s Jewish Homeland-Delegitimizing Poisoned Pejoratives
Rabbi Dov Fischer had a sound Israel Hayom article this week, Why Rename Judea and Samaria? It Has Always Been Preposterous to Call Judea and Samaria the “West Bank.” His point:
“Judea and Samaria – Yehuda and Shomron – should be called by their real names and not the ersatz Woke term that seeks to divest 800,000 Jews now living there of their heritage and of their land…. Names have great power and meanings. That is why Israel’s enemies call that region “The West Bank.” And why we should call it Judea and Samaria.”
Indeed, but by me what’s most preposterous or worse is we Jews mindlessly mouthing any of the anti-Jewish homeland loaded lexicon’s poisoned pejoratives. The language of Arab-Israeli conflict discourse is exclusively Jewish homeland-delegitimizing. It is a shanda on the Jewish people that we ourselves not just acquiesce in but use it.
West Bank: The Hebrew-origin biblical names “Judea” and “Samaria” remained in use all through the post-biblical centuries, even by the UN in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….” The invader Jordan coined “West Bank” in 1950 for the same reason the Romans renamed Judaea as “Palestine” in 135 – to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews.
East Jerusalem: “East” Jerusalem isn’t some suburb or satellite of the historic Jerusalem that’s been the capital of three native states, all Jewish, in the past 3,000 years and has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Turkish rule. “East” is Jewish homeland delegitimizers’ name for that historic city – Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all.
Romans Exiled the Jews: Actually, they didn’t, refuted by synagogue and other Jewish remains all over the land from the Roman-Byzantine era, Roman recognition of the patriarch as head of the homeland Jews until the fifth century, the writing in the land of the Mishnah and then Jerusalem Talmud, and participation of self-mustered battalions of twenty thousand homeland Jews fighting alongside the invading Persians against the hated Byzantines in 614. Jews stayed during the long centuries of Muslim dynasty, Crusader, Mamluk and Turk empire rule.
Israel was Created/Founded in 1948: Israel re-proclaimed its independence in that year as the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader, during which time Jews continued to live in the land, writing, as historian Parkes put it, today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”
War that Followed Israel’s Creation: It was a UN partition-rejecting multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, thrown back by a homeland army of homeland Jews, not bad for a state that had just been “created.”
Palestinian Refugees of the War that Followed Israel’s Creation: Most of the Arabs who left tiny Israel (fewer than the number of Israel-absorbed Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in the 1948 war’s wake), left at the instance of the Arab invaders to “temporarily get out of the way” while they disposed of the Jews.
Zionist Entity: They call Israel this not just to avoid saying “Israel,” but to date Jewish connection to the land of Israel to the late nineteenth century-begun Zionist movement. Zionism, per the old pre-state quip of “a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine,” didn’t start something new but reinvigorated the ongoing millennia-long return of Diaspora Jews to our homeland.
Israel was Created Because of the Holocaust: “[Maybe] a Holocaust happened in Europe, so why should the Palestinians suffer?” The Zionist movement and League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate antedated the Holocaust, but the Jews’ claim to the land of Israel, including through prior sovereignty and continued physical presence, antedated the Holocaust by millennia.
The UN Sought to Partition Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian States: That’s like partitioning Pennsylvania between Jews and Pennsylvanians. The UN didn’t say that. It said “Arab and Jewish States” [emphasis added] over and over. It even called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.”
The Palestinians: Palestinian Arabs have no claim to being the exclusive people of Palestine. Its entire 1948 population was less than two million people, a good third of them Jews. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Palestine ever, while Jews, who never fully left, are sovereign there now for the third time. And even foreign Arabs only ruled between 638 and 1099.
Palestinian Refugee Issue, Refugee Camps: The Arab-Israeli conflict created more Middle-eastern Jewish than Arab refugees. Israel absorbed the Jews into its population, but Arab states have isolated Arabs who left Israel and generations of their descendants in UN-supported “refugee camps” in Arab lands and Arab-ruled areas of Palestine itself.
Right of Return: It’s a claim, not a right, and ignores that Israel absorbed more indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left Israel.
Occupied Territories, Palestinian Territories, Occupied Palestinian Territories: Jewish presence in the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan River, the Jewish national home of the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate endorsed by the United Nations, is by historical and legal right, not “occupation,” and Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, which Palestinian Arabs have never ruled ever, are not “occupied Palestinian territories,” the San Remo and Palestine Mandate and even UNSC 242-violating UNSC 2334 notwithstanding.
Jewish Settlers, Jewish Settlements: The media, sometimes in the same sentence, gleefully contrasts Israeli or Jewish “settlements” with nearby “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns, villages,” and “Jewish settlers” with “Palestinian residents.” Alas, even Israel and Israelis say “settlements,” which is delegitimizing, inaccurate and counter-productive.
Captured by Israel in 1967: The media insistently says this to date Jewish connection to historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria to their liberation by Israel in the 1967 war, suppressing three millennia prior Jewish connection.
Israel’s 1967 Borders: This is media-speak for the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines, “the green line” drawn with a green pen, which were expressly declared in their defining document, the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement, not to be political borders prejudicing either side’s border claims. But borders have an international law gravitas, surviving later fighting, which ceasefire lines lack. The defunct 1949 green line, obliterated by renewed 1967 fighting, again initiated by Jordan, and succeeded by the 1967 war’s infinitely more secure for Israel ceasefire line, is not among the Holy Land’s holy places.
Ultranationalists’ Greater Israel: The Palestine Mandate, recognizing Jewish connection to Palestine and specifying a Jewish national home there with close settlement of Jews on the land, included a clause enabling the Mandatory, Britain, to extract from its provisions the 78% east of the Jordan River. This Britain did, creating Transjordan, today’s Jordan. Israelis claiming the entirety of the remaining 22%, including historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, as that Jewish national home are not “ultranationalists” claiming areas to which Jews have no historical or legal claim, just valid claimants defending against a second partition’s Lesser Israel.
Two-State Solution Creating a Palestinian State: This expression implies that there does not already exist in Palestine two states, one of which is a Palestinian Arab-majority state. But there does. Israel and Jordan are the Palestine Mandates’ states, and Jordan, 78% of that territory, has a Palestinian Arab majority. Jordan never existed in history. Why is there no hue & cry to make Jordan “Democratic and Arab,” or to partition that 78% already Arab part of what had been the Palestine Mandate between the Hashemites, installed there out-of-the-blue by Britain, and Palestinian Arabs? Why re-partition between Arabs and Jews the 22% which Palestine’s first partition left for the Jews?
Israel is a Settler-Colonial Project: Bullshit. The Jews who came to Israel from Europe were not army-wielding colonial rulers, but victims of centuries of persecution – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom – in those European countries by those countries’ majority Christians. And they came there largely against the will (ask, e.g., Bevin, popes and rulers decreeing against “transport of Jews to the East”) of those European powers. And the majority of Israel’s population is not Ashkenazi-European, but Sephardi and Mizrahi, largely from indigenously North African and Middle-eastern dhimmi (Jim Crow on Steroids) Jewish communities in Arab and other Muslim lands. The Jewish people is indigenous to the Mideast.
With all due respect to Rabbi Fischer, “preposterous” – defined by Encarta as “going very much against what is thought to be sensible or reasonable” – doesn’t go far enough in describing our own use of the above and their like dirty words. “Self-disrespecting” and “counter-productive,” even “ridicule inviting,” is how I would put it. And so I beseech you, you who have read this epistle so far, become a Jewish homeland-defending Word Warrior. And any Jew you see saying “West Bank,” throw a Ben & Jerry ice cream cone in their direction.